Quick Review: Acer Liquid Jade Z S57

The rather oddly named Liquid Jade Z S57 is one of the budget smart phone offerings from Acer. At around €180 it is good value for money and while it has a good screen it just feels cheap in comparison to the Moto G. Anyway here are a few good and bad points:

Good

Nice big screen with 1280×720 resolution which is good for the price. In my view better than my old Moto G.

Expandable, you can drop in extra storage space without any problems.

Thin and relatively light weight.

Good value for money.

Quad core. so pretty fast (when first bought, see later).

Reasonably decent audio for the money, they even include some OK headphones.

13mp built-in camera, on paper at least this is fine.

Bad

The casing feels cheap in comparison to my old Moto G.

There are two clocks, the central one on the main screen and one on the top right. They crash frequently so you end up with two different times. Recently the difference was about 12-14 hours. I have never had this kind of severe problem with previous Android phones. This crash often can bring down the entire phone, Whatsapp for example has severe problems when it suspects you are tampering with time.

The display is almost unusable under bright sunlight (not a problem unique to Acer).

Lots of pre-installed apps which you cannot easily get rid of.

Prone to crashing, it reboots so you find out hours later that your phone has been off all afternoon.

Gets slower and slower and slower, so now it takes ages to even start up.

1GB memory is a limiting factor, Acer do though provide a memory optimiser.

Rather ugly UI.

Built-in speakers are very tinny.

Slow camera and not the best in terms of quality.

Would I buy it again? Probably not. It is acceptable enough for every day use although the increasing slowness is driving me mad. If that problem could be resolved then I would recommend the phone.

About Rod McCall

Rod McCall is a researcher in the field of human-computer interaction in areas such as augmented reality, mobile gaming in-car systems and virtual environments. He has a passing interest in economics after not being entirely convinced by the rubbish presented as fact during lectures on that particular subject while at uni.